Town debates permitting hot dog cart

Planning commissioners split on licensing pickle.

Debra Boulay mans the Hot Dog Hut cart last Saturday in front of Petco on U.S. 278, where she and her husband, hot dog cart proprietor Richard Boulay, participated in a Maranatha Farms pet adoption event. The couple seeks a Bluffton business license to operate at two locations in town limits.

A Bluffton couple's quest to bring a hot dog cart to Old Town has cooked up a permitting and licensing debate at Town Hall.

Milt Rhodes, town planning director, said town code does not specifically allow - or disallow - issuing a business license for a hot dog stand. He asked the Planning Commission for advice Wednesday night on what to do.

Commissioners offering opinions were split over whether to allow a stand, but most favored granting the request.

"If the code is silent on it, what would prohibit it?" said Commissioner Andrew Colvin.

"I don't have a problem with it," Commissioner Emmett McCracken said. "If you can buy a hot dog on the streets of New York, you ought to be able to buy a hot dog in Bluffton."

Commissioner Donald Blair asked where the town would "draw the line" or if it could "pick and choose" what to allow.

"I'm not particularly against hot dogs. I think that might be a good idea. Or ice cream," Blair said.

But what if a vendor wanted to sell "trinkets ... or black-velvet Elvis pillows or tie-dyed T-shirts?" he said. "Are we setting a basis for those kinds of things to operate, or can we say, 'You're OK and you're not?' ....

"I think it's treading on dangerous ground," Blair said.

The startup hot dog entrepreneurs, Richard Bouley, 64, and Debra Boulay, 57, of Cold Creek Pass in the Edgefield subdivision, said they applied for a town business license about three weeks ago. They said they have an operations license from the state Department of Health and Environmental Control and a business license from Beaufort County.

The town business license application was still pending review on Thursday, business license administrator Rhonda Patterson.

Subject to town approval, they said they have agreements to operate the stand for lunchtime sales outside two retail locations. Some days they would set up outside The Store, on the Lawrence Street side of the corner property fronting Calhoun Street. Other days they'd operate outside the Habitat for Humanity resale store at Bluffton Road and Dr. Mellichamp Drive.

When operating at the Habitat outlet in an area between the two buildings, they said they would give portion of earnings to the charity.

Commissioner Carmen Gray said she thought The Store would be a good location for a hot-dog cart, but not the unpaved area at the Habitat site. She said it would be "dusty and dirty, and "I just think it would be out of place there."

Rhodes said planning staff is generally favorable to the hot-dog cart request. "We think it adds character and flavor to our 'main street' and it may provide another opportunity to support tourism ... and keep people in the area a little longer."

He added the "municipal code makes it very clear these kinds of uses are not allowed in public rights of way," but the hot-dog sales would be on private property.

He said the Old Town Code, which deals with the Historic District area including Calhoun and Lawrence Streets, is "silent" on the issue. He said the Unified Code, which covers the rest of the town, including the Habitat ReStore site in a "neighborhood general" area, doesn't address the specific issue, either.

McCracken asked if it would be possible to limit the number of stands. Rhodes said it could be arranged so there are not too many.

Blair said the Bluffton Farmers Market is permitted to operate one day a week on Calhoun Street, and after the Thursday time-block, the vendors "go away." But an outside vendor operating several hours a day "becomes a whole different thing," Blair said.

"I don't know where you draw the line between a McDonald's, really, and a ... hot-dog stand. They're both the same, as far as I'm concerned.

"Is it a plus to the Old Town or is it a visual negative? Once you open the door, I can see a proliferation of 40 or 50 other people who say, 'Gee; that's a good idea. I can put an ice-cream stand here," or anything else.

Colvin said he appreciated staff bringing up the issue and it should be looked into. But, "for the time being, I don't see how we can keep these people from operating their business. Until we get our act together, I don't see how we can hold them up."

Asked what's next, Rhodes said it "falls back on staff" to interpret the code, and he would go to upper management for direction. He said staff could deny the business license request and possible come back with recommendations for code revisions. Or staff could grant the license and identify conditions.

In other action Wednesday, the commission voted 7-0 to recommend Town Council adoption of a revised stormwater manual to add volume control methodologies.

The commission voted 6-0 to approve a renovations development plan for Bluffton Elementary and Bluffton Middle schools, with Colvin recuing himself to avoid a conflict. Members voted 4-2, with Colvin and Tauri Duer opposed and McCracken abstaining, to allow removal of a 23-inch diameter pine on a commercial building lot at Stock Farm if the developer adds "six good quality hardwood, 2.5-inch caliper trees."

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I think Bluffton needs to have certain guidelines in place, such as, only one vendor per so many feet or area and only food vendors not retail! I don't think we want a cart on every corner of Bluffton. Also, there is a food vendor in front of Home Depot, what about them?

There was a Taco stand near the parking lot of the gas station at the foot of the bridge awhile back too. I went there to buy my crew lunch after filling my truck up one afternoon and the stand was so dirty I wouldn't place an order for anything. While walking back to my truck the guy got mad at me for not buying anything and started muttering something in Spanish so I turned around, showed him the mess he had on the counter and around the stand, and told him if he would clean it up he might get some business from people. He said he gets enough business from his "normal crowd" to make money there and didn't need my advice.
-I guess his "normal crowd" found someplace else to eat because the Taco stand is long gone.

Perhaps the fact that the codes, both Old Town and Unified, are silent on this matter indicates a course to maintain? Or is it a call for the city to add bureaucracy and regulations? As a vendor myself I think that a descriptive application for a business permit is sufficient for this town to keep track of who's doing business and where. Please keep the government intervention to a minimum even if it goes against your instincts. Vendors are business people too and deserve respect as such. Vendors are the origins of all modern business and have a long history of providing a multiplicity of goods and services. This is a good thing for any community, even if you have to glimpse a "velvet Elvis" from time to time. Not everything currently on view in town is to my taste either.

It's MEXICAN food, WHHI. So when you referred to my crew as "illegal", do you think people thought your were inferring that my crew were POLISH illegal residents?
In fact it was YOUR comment that sounded "racist" to me by asking why I would take my crew to a taco stand.......and then saying immigration must not have been around.

As I stated earlier......................Exactly WHAT have you contributed here on these blogs since your "comeback", do you think could be considered Intelligent information/dialog?
-I haven't seen anything yet.

It was the first and last time I ever stopped at that Taco stand, so I didn't exactly "patronize" the place. I try and give local small businesses my money as often as possible which is why I even stopped there to begin with. And FYI, he DID have a business license (there's an "s" in license, by the way) taped to the inside of the stand.

I can see why you're ready to puke. You've probably been re-reading some of the crap you've been posting since your "comeback", in an effort to try and fingure out why you can't keep up.
-Makes me want to puke too.

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